Amazon looks for cheaper alternatives to Claude as Anthropic moves to token-based pricing

Amazon is considering cheaper alternatives to Anthropic's Claude models after the two companies renegotiated their contract, The Information reports. Starting in 2027, billing will move to a token-based scheme that could significantly increase the retailer's AI costs.

What's changing in the Anthropic contract

Under the new pricing scheme, cost is tied not to a fixed subscription or reserved compute capacity but to the number of tokens processed — the units of text a model reads and generates. The more heavily Amazon's products and services use Claude, the bigger the final bill.

• The Amazon–Anthropic contract is moving to a token-based pricing model
• The new scheme takes effect no earlier than 2027
• According to The Information, the pricing could substantially increase what Amazon spends on Claude
• Amazon is already exploring alternative model providers, including OpenAI

Why Amazon is looking for alternatives

Token-based billing ties costs directly to usage. The more deeply Claude is integrated into Amazon's services — from internal developer tools to customer-facing products — the faster the bill grows under this kind of scheme. At Amazon's scale, even a moderate increase in the per-token price can add up to a significant sum in absolute terms, especially if model usage keeps growing.

That's why, while renegotiating terms with Anthropic, the retailer has also started looking at other large language model providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic's direct competitor in this market. Diversifying AI model suppliers is standard practice for big tech companies: it reduces dependence on a single partner and gives them more leverage in future price negotiations.

What it means

The episode shows that even close AI partners — and Amazon has long had tight ties to Anthropic — see their commercial interests diverge as soon as payment terms change. As language models become part of large companies' infrastructure, the price per token is becoming as much a subject of competition and negotiation as the price of cloud compute or network traffic once was.